An empty hole was discovered inside the Pyramid of Giza

It has now been discovered a “huge empty space”, approximately 30 meters long, inside the Pyramid of Giza. The investigation counted on the use of cosmic rays to make a sort of radiography to the emblematic Egyptian monument.

It was an international team of scientists who recently discovered, this vast empty space, hidden behind the thick walls of the Great Pyramid of Giza. This hole is 30 meters long and has a volume and height similar to that of the Great Gallery, one of the largest chambers in the Egyptian pyramid. Scientists, funded by the Egyptian government, do not yet know what the purpose of the chamber was, and they also point out that “many architectural hypotheses have to be considered”.

According to a study published this week in the journal Nature, this discovery was made possible by a tomography made from the cosmic rays. These rays are composed of highly energetic elementary particles that traverse space in all directions at a speed very close to that of light. When these particles interact with the highest layers of the atmosphere, millions of electron-like particles enter Earth: they are the muons. So, what these scientists did was to use the muons to make a kind of radiography to the Great Pyramid of Giza, thus unraveling a chamber that had never been visualized by the researchers.

This project brought together Japanese scientists from the University of Nagoya and the French Committee on Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy, who were in Egypt to install muon detectors in the pyramid in the year 2015. The experience was as follows, if the muons were to focus on walls of the pyramid, but with greater density in the empty spaces. That is what happened, in fact, there was a greater concentration of particles in the chambers that were already known – Queen’s Chamber, Grand Gallery and King’s Chamber. But experience also showed a fourth “empty space”, which corresponds to a never previously seen.

This empty space, and another but much smaller one, found in 2016 in the same pyramid, will now begin to be exploited using robots and more mule detonators. For this, more physicists, geologists, archaeologists and artificial intelligence experts will be hired who will have the mission to discover and understand what these new chambers were for, or if they are connected by corridors to others already known.

This technique is not new. In the 1970s, American physicist Luis Alvarez used the same strategy to explore Pyramid of Khafre and discovered that there were no new cameras to be found inside. Later, the muons were also used to observe the interior of volcanoes, the Fukushima
nuclear power station, archaeological sites in Italy, and the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico.